Imagine if next year you had to pay 10 times as much to renew your domain name as you paid this year. Based on an action proposed by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), price caps could be removed on several top level domains, which could significantly increase the price of domains.

[…]

ICANN’s current contract with Public Interest Registry (PIR), the group that runs the .org domain name, lets PIR increase the wholesale price of .org domains by 10% a year.

That’s a lot, but at least it’s capped.

Now ICANN is proposing extending the contract to operate .org but letting PIR set whatever prices it wants. Rather than a 10% increase to renew your domain next year, it could suddenly start charging registrars like Namecheap 100 times as much. Registrars would have no choice but to pass these charges on to customers.

This actually affects .biz and .info as well as .org; you might notice that this website is on a .biz domain, so it affects me. I also have an .org site that would also be impacted. And there are so many other .org sites out there which are run by non-profits or individuals who do things for reasons other than pure profit.

Anyway, from the Namecheap blog entry there are links to comment on all three open issues, namely .org, .info, and .biz. If others would be so kind as to send their comments it would be greatly appreciated.

As inspiration, here’s what I wrote:

I am an independent publisher on the web. I have multiple domain names, including ones in .biz and .org, which I use for sharing my work with the internet at large. I create for the love of creation and make almost no money at it.

I have the luxury of being able to pay for my domains out of pocket. If my domains were to suddenly increase in price, however, I would not be able to continue with this, and would have to constantly move to domains I can afford, disrupting all incoming links and destroying my audience.

The legacy gTLDs were created as a common trust, not as a profit center, and their registration price is already grossly inflated compared to the infrastructure cost of making them available.

I urge you to consider independent content creators like myself when setting domain pricing policy.